EA Exec Says Its Games Are "Too Hard to Learn" For New Players

Electronic Arts' chief creative officer Richard Hilleman reckons that most people don't want to spend two hours learning how to play a game.

Are games "too hard?" Sometimes, yes. Some games, like Dark Souls and Hotline Miami are actually famous for being hard. How about Electronic Arts games? Most of us gaming enthusiasts would scoff at the idea of Battlefield or The Sims being too difficult for anyone to grasp, but according to Electronic Arts' chief creative officer Richard Hilleman, most of its games are still "too hard to learn" for the average player.

"Our games are actually still too hard to learn," Hilleman said during during an on-stage interview at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. "The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game."

Again, while most of us gaming enthusiasts would not be fazed by a two-hour long tutorial, Hilleman explains that "asking for two hours of somebody's time--most of our customers, between their normal family lives...to find two contiguous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask."

In the same interview, Shadow of Mordor design director Michael de Plater chipped in that in the future, we will be seeing more and more RPG elements in non-RPG games. "Every game is an RPG now," he said. "You wouldn't make a game without progression and levels and XP."

He also added that "And I think every game is going to be a social game...good ideas propagate."

So, if EA was to follow along the lines of Hilleman and de Plater's comments, every game coming out of the company should have a tutorial no longer than a few minutes, be packed full of RPG elements, and reward you for sharing every aspect of your progress on as many social media outlets as possible.